August 2016

Teresa Carlson leads the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Worldwide Public Sector business, which includes state, local, central and regional governments; educational institutions and Ed Techs, and non-profits and non-governmental organizations (NGO), and acts as an advisor to Amazon Public Policy on global policy issues. Since starting AWS’s public sector business in 2010, Carlson has driven the business’ growth, which today accounts for 2,000 government, 4,500 education, and 17,500 nonprofit customers, and a vast partner ecosystem across all geographies.

Prior to joining AWS, Carlson served as Vice President of Microsoft Federal Government, where she was responsible for defining the strategy for the company’s US Federal Government business. Before moving into technology, Carlson worked in health care, as a practitioner and consultant initially, then as a business manager and area vice president, responsible for national accounts, marketing, and business development...

Cloud computing is quickly becoming popular and the number of cloud based applications is increasing with the passage of each day. One of these is the cloud based knowledge base. A knowledge base is a digital resource that contains data as well as the rules for sharing and updating information in an organization.

KNOWLEDGE BASE

A knowledge base can either be placed on a local server or an internet cloud. Knowledge management software is used to optimize the collection of related information, as well as offer management controls. These controls govern the way that employees in an organization can use the available data and add value to it...

The possibilities that the Internet of Things creates for a business will require a drastic rethink of operating models and IT infrastructure. A factory, for instance, will have the potential to run several times faster with connected sensors. These sensors collect and analyse data to improve the efficiency of the company. But what use are these ambitions, if network infrastructures are simply too immature to react to the findings, preventing the delivery of real-time data that could affect business outcomes?network world image

Cisco estimates that a whopping 50 billion devices will be connected to the Internet by 2020 – a bold prediction, soaring above the mid-range estimates of Gartner at 20.8 billion, and BI Intelligence at 34 billion. The exact figure remains to be seen, but the sheer variety and volume of devices entering the enterprise are sure to be a major disruptive influence...

Liquid Web, a $90 million web hosting and cloud services provider devoted to delighting customers, today announced it has signed an agreement to purchase Rackspace® (NYSE: RAX) Cloud Sites business unit, which will remain in San Antonio.

Users of the Cloud Sites platform, who include designers, developers and digital agencies, should expect a seamless transition as Liquid Web and Rackspace work together to complete the transaction. In fact, Liquid Web plans to invest in developing innovative solutions on the Cloud Sites platform to better serve these savvy, skilled professionals who are dependent on a highly available and reliable hosting provider.

Cloud computing offers lots of benefits, but improved security is not one that makes many IT lists. In fact, many -- perhaps even most -- IT pros still believe that cloud computing means a huge step backward in terms of security risk. That doesn't seem to be the case. About 10 percent of our workloads now run on public clouds, and so far, so good.

Why? Ironically, partly because IT has been so paranoid about public clouds that it spent time and money to implement advanced security approaches such as identity and access management and to be more proactive about security measures. Moreover, public cloud providers themselves understand the importance of security. If they get one cross-tenant hack, they are done for...

The benefits of storing data in the cloud are clear. However, as businesses are beginning to closely examine what having data in the cloud entails, they’re discovering that their relationships with cloud vendors are sometimes, well, cloudy. In a 2015 Forrester Consulting survey, more than 60% of businesses said issues with transparency were stalling further expansion into the cloud. These organisations are justified in being wary, because knowing where data is going and how it is being treated is paramount. I’ll explain why the next wave of successful cloud providers will compete on these issues rather than price, product or market.

Why is location important?

If backups are vaulted in the wrong geographic location, businesses limit their ability to rebound from an incident within the necessary recovery time objectives (RTOs), due to latency concerns and bandwidth cost. The goal of strategically selecting where data will be vaulted is to minimise organisational risk as much as possible...

Panzura, the leading provider of hybrid cloud storage for the enterprise, today announced its 5000 series of expandable enterprise hybrid cloud controllers, available immediately. This new generation of controllers scales from 1000s of users in a single site to tens of 1000s of users across global offices. Using Panzura's patented hybrid cloud storage software, customers can accelerate time to market of multi-billion dollar projects and high value software products by months, reduce on-premise storage costs by millions of dollars, and deliver a future proof hybrid cloud storage architecture. Organizations like Electronic Arts, Milwaukee Tool, National Instruments and the Department of Justice use Panzura for global software development and build delivery, high value asset distribution, cross-site CAD collaboration, hybrid cloud NAS and active archive.

Panzura software, available with the 5000 series, enables globally dispersed employees and machines to work together like they are in the same location. With Panzura, customers can implement distributed continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) environments to move software builds of up to hundreds of gigabytes to multiple sites worldwide in minutes totaling terabytes of builds globally distributed per day. Example projects include developing and distributing game builds globally, architecting skyscrapers and amusement parks using teams from multiple offices, transferring large-scale seismic data to compute farms on different continents and designing power tools collaboratively between teams in different countries.

Zenoss Inc., the leader in hybrid IT monitoring and analytics software, today announced it has released new extensions that provide granular level monitoring capabilities for popular OpenStack components, such as Ceph and Cinder Storage, Nova Compute services, and Neutron networking connectivity. These components represent some of the most highly utilized projects in the OpenStack Community according to an OpenStack User Survey released in April 2016, which showed an incredible 97% adoption rate for Nova and equally impressive 90% adoption rate for Neutron.

Zenoss Service Dynamics is an Open Source monitoring platform that can be extended through plug-ins, called ZenPacks, that allow you to monitor a vast array of devices, applications, and systems under a single unified dashboard. The OpenStack ZenPack provides insight into the overall status and health of an OpenStack deployment, and provides actionable data for dozens of the most highly utilized elements of an OpenStack cloud including:

Fugue, Inc. announced today the availability of its cloud-native solution for fully automating the deployment, operations and enforcement of cloud infrastructure at scale.

Enterprises are moving to the cloud to increase competitiveness and efficiency. However, complexity explodes in the cloud, and achieving those goals is challenging, as most DevOps teams today are forced to manually stitch together disparate tool sets. Fugue tackles this complexity with a cohesive system that allows DevOps professionals to define infrastructure upfront, leverage a runtime component to ensure that all cloud resources remain consistent with that definition, and automatically correct configuration drift. Furthermore, Fugue eliminates wasteful and error-prone cloud maintenance burdens that slow innovation and increase compliance and security risks. As the technological gateway that unlocks the power of the cloud, Fugue helps businesses achieve digital transformation and competitive advantage goals.

The Sixth Flag, Inc. a leading Enterprise Desktop-As-A-Service solution, today announced that it has been identified as a representative vendor in Gartner's recently published Market Guide for Desktop as a Service report authored by Nathan Hill, Tiny Haynes, Michael A. Silver, and Federica Troni, published August 1, 2016.

"We are delighted to again be mentioned by Gartner among DaaS vendors. Our just released concurrent pricing model, also highlighted in the report, offers customers flexibility regardless of company size. With the increased demand for enterprise BYOD, The Sixth Flag offers an attractive alternative to furnishing end users with costly hardware. BYOD and complementary solutions like The Sixth Flag not only reduce hardware costs but also full lifecycle management, including asset tracking and recovery," said Pete Kofod, Founder of The Sixth Flag, Inc.

Mirantis wants to become the "one-stop shop" for users of OpenStack on enterprise Linux. The company this week announced a new partnership with SUSE, adding another Linux option alongside its existing Red Hat and CentOS offerings. Mirantis is a major distributor of OpenStack, the open source platform for building cloud infrastructure on top of a Linux-based operating system.

Mirantis seeks to distinguish itself in the crowded OpenStack market by delivering what it calls a "pure-play" OpenStack distribution, allowing users to deploy any type of Linux platform in conjunction with OpenStack. While Mirantis can support any Linux distribution, it has now forged closer ties with SUSE, which develops SUSE Linux Enterprise Server...

Something interesting is underway as far as cloud computing and securities operations — the Amazon Web Services (AWS) offering has been quietly gaining ground after some initial resistance. I recall that the main concerns about using the AWS cloud revolved around compliance and security.

But Amazon zeroed in on the compliance and security demands and concerns of the securities industry by putting out a document that offers an overview of how AWS meets the regulatory requirements of the SEC’s Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations (OCIE)...

A recent survey of IT leaders finds most acknowledge that hybrid cloud computing is the way to go. However, most are also still trying to understand what it all means. Such is the result of a study of 1,050 IT executives by The Hybrid Hive, a news site sponsored by Fujitsu and several other partners.

Hybrid is already commonplace -- two-fifths of respondents report they already have a hybrid IT environment in place, while 51% are open to it. Companies are spending almost a third of their total IT budgets on cloud, with 14% spending more than half of their budgets on this technology. Four-fifths (79%) of IT executives believe it is "inevitable" that the future of corporate IT infrastructure is hybrid, while 81% agree they will have to deploy a hybrid IT environment to meet the needs of their organizations...

Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS), has visited India over a dozen times by his own reckoning. His visits, though, are not as sonorous as his boss Jeff Bezos’s. Recall how the founder and CEO of ecommerce behemoth Amazon Inc had put on a shiny bandhgala and posed for photographs, which went viral on social media, leaning out of a truck’s cabin in Bengaluru in September 2014.

Despite Jassy’s lower-pitched demeanour—he prefers a simple business suit and uses a BlackBerry Classic—he has been garnering customer after customer in the country for AWS, Amazon’s cloud computing unit, which has achieved a revenue run rate of $10 billion (around Rs 67,000 crore) globally. The unit, set up in 2006, currently garners about 15 percent of Seattle-based Amazon’s overall revenues but nearly half the company’s operating income...

Focusing on the credibility and sophistication of today’s cloud offerings, companies often look to strike a deal with the most comprehensive cloud service provider through Service Level Agreements (SLAs). As outputbased contracts, an SLA specifically defines what the customer will receive and not how the service itself is delivered, as it chalks out the services delivered by a cloud provider to fulfill the requirements of their customers.

As Gartner expertly states, an institution considering cloud computing must understand the detailed terms and conditions and the risks of signing the service provider’s standard contract before moving to a cloud computing solution. Most significantly, cloud customers should closely evaluate application workflow in cloud SLAs. This allows them to determine application response time and identify the resources that support the applications...

In the London Olympics of 2012, the US Cycling Women’s trio was 5.676 seconds shy of snatching the gold from the Great Britain contenders (who broke the world record). This year, the US team is leaving nothing to chance by upgrading their tools, using the best technology available in the cloud computing space.

IBM helped develop a groundbreaking analytics system that pairs environmental and rider data. Sensors developed by Stages captures cyclist data 64 times a second. The power required to make sense of this plus many other data inputs rely on the cloud. Through the IBM Watson Internet of Things Platform, coaches can track athlete power watts, lap timing, new muscle oxygenation and matched burned results in real time...

The rise of cloud computing has been a game-changer for not only businesses, but also IT pros looking to stay relevant. Here are 9 must-have skills in different aspects of cloud technologies needed to compete. Cloud computing is a huge part of IT, and its growth shows no sign of slowing down.

As an IT professional, it makes sense to start looking into obtaining skills in different aspects of cloud technologies to further your career. Here, we've identified 9 of those skills. Keep in mind, we're not suggesting that all IT pros are going to be working for a service provider one day. In reality, most will end up on the customer end of the cloud relationship...

Cloud is most definitely in fashion when it comes to business tech, but researchers are currently exploring ways in which to literally embed cloud into fashion. US Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham are looking into developing a fully functioning, lightweight cloud computing system embedded into clothing – meaning a wearable personal cloud could soon become the ultimate accessory.

Rajib Hasan, assistant professor of computer and information sciences in the UAB college of Arts and Sciences, and Rasib Khan, a recent postdoctoral graduate student, presented their wearable cloud jacket at the 40th institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Society International Conference on Computers, Softwares and Applications (IEEE COMPSAC) in June...